Leftists Are Slowly Realizing That They Have No Path To Victory Pt 1

by Brett Stevens on December 2, 2020

http://www.amerika.org/politics/leftists-are-slowly-realizing-that-they-have-no-path-to-victory/

It got quiet out there again. A few days ago, activity picked up to that kind of frenzied pace that suggests people distracting themselves. It happened right after the Barr announcement, when that failed to be the magic bullet that made Trump go away. The complex reality set in moments later.

Now people are back to depression (mental, not economic, although that too is coming) behavior. They are staying in, watching the news obsessively, drinking too much screw-top wine, and generally feeling pretty bad about things. An ominous quiet descends.

Slowly it is dawning upon the Left, not so much the leadership but the supporters, that this is not going to end well, and therefore, it has already ended, and not well for them. In fact, they are only seeing the first swells of a wave.

As said here before, Trump now has two tasks in front of him: secure the presidency and terminate the Swamp. The first will be a Constitutional case, and the second will involve a variety of methods. At least some of those will succeed, and that is enough.

The Supreme Court established a solid standard in Bush v. Gore (2000):

Equal protection applies as well to the manner of its exercise. Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of another. See, e.g., Harper v. Virginia Bd. of Elections, 383 U.S. 663, 665 (1966) (“[O]nce the franchise is granted to the electorate, lines may not be drawn which are inconsistent with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment”).

…The recount mechanisms implemented in response to the decisions of the Florida Supreme Court do not satisfy the minimum requirement for non-arbitrary treatment of voters necessary to secure the fundamental right.

…The record provides some examples. A monitor in Miami-Dade County testified at trial that he observed that three members of the county canvassing board applied different standards in defining a legal vote. 3 Tr. 497, 499 (Dec. 3, 2000). And testimony at trial also revealed that at least one county changed its evaluative standards during the counting process.

…The recount process, in its features here described, is inconsistent with the minimum procedures necessary to protect the fundamental right of each voter in the special instance of a statewide recount under the authority of a single state judicial officer.

In other words, any state action which does not treat all voters the same falls afoul of this standard, including last-minute changes to how things are done. You will note, if you read carefully, that Trump and Giuliani hit on each one of the examples given in the case in their own public complaints.

We have many examples of the state doing things differently for different classes of voters, the biggest being that mail-in voters were not subjected to the scrutiny that normal voters faced. This means that the great Leftist election theft of 2000 is going to go badly in the courts.

For example, look at how state legislators made unequal voting through changes to the vote procedure in Pennsylvania:

Democrat PA Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar asked the Democrat larded Supreme Court for more time to count ballots than by the original Election Day deadline.

She also requested all mail-in ballots be accepted whether signatures on ballots match voter rolls or not. In both cases, Democrats granted the Democrats requests.

Hundreds of thousands of unsupervised mail-in ballots came flooding in to be counted days after Election Day with Donald Trump ahead in Pennsylvania by over 600,000 votes at the time.

Miraculously, that epic lead would not only evaporate, but Joe Biden would supposedly take the vote lead nearly a week later.

Couple this with the obvious election fraud in Michigan, the weird disqualification of voters in Nevada, the dual residence voters in Georgia, and the many instances of voters finding that their vote had already been cast via mail-in ballot, and you have a situation where Trump will win.

Leftists Are Slowly Realizing That They Have No Path To Victory Pt 2

by Brett Stevens on December 2, 2020

http://www.amerika.org/politics/leftists-are-slowly-realizing-that-they-have-no-path-to-victory/

Of course, something could go wrong. If I were team Trump, I would assign a security detail to every family member of everyone on the Supreme Court. I would offer them pardons for anything that comes up in blackmail, if that is legally possible. Organized crime political machines play rough.

Trump has to get this case to the Supreme Court, and the best way to do that is the laborious procedure he is now undergoing. He is taking these cases to the states, forcing them to either give in or engage in the fraud as well, and along the way, he is revealing people.

We might call Trump the Great Revealer. His modus operandi is to observe a situation, note what is bad, offer a better solution, and then see who figures it out, and reward them. Along the way, he forces the others to reveal their hand by opposing this better solution, showing that they have motivations other than the ostensible task.

Right now, Leftist politicians across the states are busily revealing themselves as entirely partisan and unconcerned with the truth of the matter. For them, in their little social bubbles and the professional circles that cross-promote their members, getting Trump out of office is the sole moral good.

The rest of us see it differently. Cheating on an election is bad enough, but if there are links to ACORN, Iran, and China as alleged, this means an international crime syndicate stole an American election so that it could favor foreign enemies over the interests of America.

You cannot screw up more than that as a politician. Trump has revealed that these people are entirely fine with a Chinese election steal by organized crime political machines and their billionaire Big Tech handmaidens, showing that these people are not just inept, but corrupt and destructive.

Right now, however, the international election theft takes second chair to the big question, which is introducing enough evidence to make this into a clear case of election suppression of Right-wing voices. Like the impeachment, the tone-deaf Left seems to miss how this looks to the world.

Even more, Trump, Guiliani, Ellis, Powell, and Wood get to publicize this evidence and enter it into the record. Since the Left will not even consider it, this evidence goes into the record as unopposed. That makes it a part of any future legal actions, with the assumption that it likely has weight.

This sets up a clear path for Trump. The state courts and appeals courts will slam down hard on him, he will appeal to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court will cut and paste in the Bush v. Gore decision, unless someone holds their families hostage in a New Jersey warehouse or something.

Supposing the Supreme Court does not act in favor of Trump. What, then? Then Biden assumes the White House, and Trump goes on a lawsuit binge. First he sues for financial damages, probably hitting the DNC, ACORN, the Chinese government, possibly the Iranians if they have any American money left, the billionaires, and the states. All that evidence goes onto the record in those trials, too. Civil courts have a lower standard than criminal courts, so Trump stands to gain back everything he spent on the election. He can also sue the DOJ and states for refusal to enforce their laws, and request the relief that those laws actually be enforced. The state attorneys can only punt so long by claiming a lack of evidence without committing professional malpractice, so they will be forced to investigate. This will cost them time and money. Even if Trump loses most of these suits, he will still recover a great deal of money.

Leftists Are Slowly Realizing That They Have No Path To Victory Pt 3

by Brett Stevens on December 2, 2020

http://www.amerika.org/politics/leftists-are-slowly-realizing-that-they-have-no-path-to-victory/

What, then? America will immediately face the pain of having a discredited leader. Biden will be unable to get anything done, which is fine by China, but not by American business, which will find itself getting destroyed on the international stage. Nor will this be fine with the American people, who will see their nation getting treated like a criminal vassal state of China. Any allies that America will still have at that time will either back away or quietly ignore most of what comes from Washington. Biden will be the worst kind of president: one that no one trusts, and no one wants to work with. America will find itself unable to borrow more money, and will go into a default, followed by bankruptcy proceedings. No one is going to lend money to a criminal state except other criminals. No one who is not criminal wants to deal with the criminals, so America will find itself very alone and ranked very low by the markets, causing trillions in losses. If you think the COVID-19 economy is bad, wait until you see the discredited Biden economy. Those in power know that this will be the case, and they would like to avoid it, so “something” will come up to remove Biden, most likely impeachment, since if Trump proves that Biden participated in election fraud or was elected by it, removal is the only remedy, and business as well as most Americans will support it.

Supposing the Left got their absolute wet dream: Biden takes over, imports new voters, enacts his pro-China and pro-globalism policy, and throws Trump and his supporters in jail. At that point, the world will react to America as they did to Nazi Germany, and America will be forced into war shortly thereafter because other states will be treating it like a threat and refusing to play nice. The discredited Biden presidency followed by tyrannical actions would result in immediate world political chaos, and America would find herself fighting yet again, this time without support from the competent military, business, or citizens. This scenario probably ends in mushroom clouds or at least a good nerve gassing of one major city. Wars between nuclear powers where no one can afford to lose end in radical defensive postures and consequently, paranoid responses with weapons of mass destruction. In the meantime, since they cannot jail 74 million people, the remaining Trump supporters will be engineering legal challenges and regime change. America will disintegrate as its war fortunes wane.

If SCOTUS punts, and Trump does not go immediately to jail, which he would not even if charged since it would take several years for the trial, he will roam free with lawsuits that bring both heavy civil penalties and criminal charges. Not every judge is a Democrat, and some of them have some guts and enough mental wherewithal to sequester their families in Switzerland for the summer. Whatever Trump spent on the election, if the election is found fraudulent under the lighter standards of a civil court trial (“the preponderance of the evidence” versus “beyond a reasonable doubt” in a criminal court), the DNC will find itself paying out in damages. Others who lost elections may join in. A billion dollars in penalties would end the DNC, but Trump may also sue Biden and anyone else who participated in the fraud.

This means that most likely, SCOTUS acts according to stare decisis — deference to previous legal opinions — and Trump wins. If not, he destroys the Democrats and Biden in civil court, and possibly forces the states to bring criminal charges against anyone who participated in or validated this sham election. Undoubtedly, at least one of these people will roll over and give evidence, meaning that the charges are going to go all the way to the top, and whoever is behind this mess will find themselves facing huge costs and then, huge judgments levied against them.

If we add all of this up, it means that the Left has no path to victory here; even if they win, they lose. Their entire plan consisted of stealing the election and using media power to force Trump to concede, but by pure stubborness and thinking ahead, he has defeated them. They have already lost, and may be planning to flee to Cuba where they will be safe from nasty US extraditions and can continue to wage their political jihad against the Right. How many of them have Florida homes and private planes? Cuba is just ninety miles away, and no doubt the Communist government there will light up a 3:00 AM airfield for such heroes of the Revolution!

Leftists Are Slowly Realizing That They Have No Path To Victory Pt 4

by Brett Stevens on December 2, 2020

http://www.amerika.org/politics/leftists-are-slowly-realizing-that-they-have-no-path-to-victory/

Leftists attempt gambits like this all the time. If they win, they gain massive respect in their peer group. As narcissists, it never occurs to them that they might not win; their whole strategy is to browbeat others into accepting what is an obvious theft, and then making those others into inferiors by forcing them to reject their own principles. Bullies thrive on this. It is not enough for them to, say, steal your cell phone. You have to know they have stolen it, and others have to know it, and you have to be unable to do anything about it. That humiliates you and makes you into part of their stable of beaten followers. You will do anything they say at that point because you are beaten and your only path to power is through them. This is how people like the Bidens, Clintons, and Obamas think. They are fundamentally narcissistic bullies who enjoy humiliating and deconstructing the personalities of others. For this reason, they assumed that they could bully their way into power and then give Trump an ambassadorship to South Africa to buy his silence. Bullies make innocent people into Stockholm Syndrome victims, and that is what the Left hoped to achieve here.

The insanity of all of this can be explained by the personality of the bully. In Detroit, back in the day, there was a homeless guy downtown who smashed car windows to toss the cars and see if there was anything of value. This being Detroit, people had nothing of value in their cars, even removing the radios simply to end the attraction. He might get $5 from a car where he did $500 in damage, but he did it night after night to dozens of cars. He probably cost the economy a million in total, passed on by workers to insurers and from them to the ordinary citizens also paying insurance, but he got a charge out of it. During the day, he was just another homeless guy. At night, he reigned over the streets, forcing all of those ordinary people to accept him and suffer under his power. He was king!

Leftists feel the same way. They might destroy an economy worth a hundred trillion dollars to steal a few billion in sum total. If China pays directly, it might take only a few million each for most of the participants and a quarter-billion for the big dogs. They assume that the world will continue as it did in the past because they are narcissists, and narcissists assume that the world they remember in their heads from when they were young will never change, no matter what they do, not that they care anyway. They will always be fine, because to them, having money means that they are immune to all of the consequences, even if China marches tanks through Washington and declares all non-conformity illegal.

They are short on Option B plans. They know what they want, and they have done their best to make it happen, but victory requires that Trump concede or at least give up and let the media, Deep State, and Big Tech usher him out of office. Since he has stalled and thwarted that process, the Left now faces accountability. Normally they get away with this by systematically destroying all evidence in their way — it only looks suspicious if you only destroy the evidence that you know could convict you, but if you wipe out everything, you just look tidy — but it looks like Trump set up a special team to trap them and he got some SIGINT that will convict them. If the Left does not steal this election, and Trump returns to office, things will go badly for them.

A second-term president Trump will likely do two things: first, he will find someone in the DOJ who will take these cases to court, and put them in charge of the DOJ, and fire them and find someone else, ad infinitum, until someone hauls these Leftists into court. This will work because now there will be an opportunity market in four years of prosecuting Leftists, with the added bonus that if you succeed, there might be four or eight more years under the next president. Second, he will invoke certain espionage acts to cut off China at the knees, starve any country foolish enough to work with China, and fire from government service anyone connected with this election fraud. That means thousands if not millions of people leaving government employment with a black mark on their records. This is why Trump used the election to drain the swamp: if he catches the Democrats doing something massively illegal, like collaborating with foreign powers, he is completely justified in doing what McCarthy could not do, and firing anyone connected with the Democrats who participated in this event. They fear this more than criminal prosecution; it will deprive them of their wealth and power, making them little people again. To a narcissist, this is worse than death.

Leftists Are Slowly Realizing That They Have No Path To Victory Pt 5

by Brett Stevens on December 2, 2020

http://www.amerika.org/politics/leftists-are-slowly-realizing-that-they-have-no-path-to-victory/

In addition, another big game seems to be afoot: changing public opinion. At the time of the election, many people voted for Biden who would now avoid ever repeating that mistake. They have seen above all else, collusion, meaning how media has been in Soviet-style lock-step in repeating terms like “baseless” and “unproven,” censoring stories on the Hunter Biden laptop of deest, deplatforming Right-wingers, and otherwise behaving like tyrants. They have seen Big Tech censorship, the pro-China and pro-globalist corporate stooges that Biden wants in his cabinet, and the jubilant response by China to the prospect of a world without Trump. They no longer trust Biden. An election held tomorrow without Dominion voting machines would produce an even bigger landslide for Trump. Even the dead might change their votes.

Even more, people have awakened to the notion that the Left is a vast criminal conspiracy, that most of the Right is compromised, and that the permanent bureaucracy in Washington wants to keep things this way and will spent us into oblivion so that they can steal what remains, then fly off to Cuba or Switzerland with suitcases of money. To them, the rest of us are detestable, stupid, even deplorable chumps who must be victimized and humiliated, then reminded of their failure from afar. Narcissists are fundamentally unhappy people because they exist in a duality; they are aware only of themselves and what they want, but they are bored with that and seek playthings, so they torture others in order to gain a sense of supremacy. They want to feel vindicated in their self-worship by destroying everything else and then standing atop the smoking ruins, proclaiming that the rest of us would have done what they did, if we were not such stupid inbred uneducated flyover dirt people. Their “happiness” requires our suffering.

This leaves the Left with two choices: go to jail now, or be thrown out of power later, since they have set up a situation which they cannot control. Being narcissists, the people in power are not aware of this, but those under them — people who have also inevitably been bullied — are starting to see the light. This means that soon the tyrants will lack foot soldiers, and find they have traitors within the gates. At that point, and only then, will they realize that the crisis has come upon them. They will fight to end because their unhappiness and rage knows no other outlet, but they have taken too much too fast and this time, they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

Following what Giuliani did in his previous investigations, Trump probably set up a team years ago in secret. They met in older government buildings under some name like “Animal Husbandry Advice Group.” They had no significant titles. To everyone else, they looked like failed bureaucrats. He probably recruited broadly from military, law enforcement, and industry. Their goal was simple: trap the signals that showed what the Democrats were doing. They hoped to be able to connect, using contact-mapping software like the Kraken, the actors in this drama with the kingpins. They want to find people who will testify. In the end, they will prevail through doing lots of grueling, detail-oriented footwork that no one else wants to do. This group was unknown to the Swamp and to the DNC, and still remains anonymous, mainly because that information comes out in the criminal trials.

We hear nothing from the leaders of the Leftist group at this point, other than continued propaganda to claim Biden as president and claim that Trump is making unproven, baseless, and self-serving accusations. It is hard to miss these things, since every social media platform, news site, college, scientific paper, and celebrity statement seems to use the same language and say the same things. However, Trump has produced enough credible information, and the Left has denied it consistently enough despite it being credible, that trust in these things is eroding. Even if the Left wins, then, they are going to lose, because they have debunked themselves and left behind more evidence than they intended to. They gambled everything and have lost, and although the leaders do not see it yet, the man on the street sure does.

No One Believes The Biden Lie PT 1

by Brett Stevens on December 4, 2020

http://www.amerika.org/politics/no-one-believes-the-biden-lie/

Three weeks ago, Leftists were dancing in the streets to celebrate a purported victory by Joe Biden in the presidential election. This unproven and baseless conjecture was then broadcast by the media, who took the alleged victory at face value, and all who failed to agree were censored or ignored.

Now that we have seen the presentation of solid evidence not just of a vote disparity but of widespread vote fraud, across multiple states, that seems to be coordinated by Leftists with the help of friends overseas, belief in the Biden election has begun its graceful arc into oblivion.

To win an election, you must offer something that the people need, show that the other guy cannot do the same, and then have a plausible story that explains your victory in terms of popularity. Joe Biden could not do this and continues to fail at it.

Doubling down on his lack of a believable victory, having campaigned little and offered nothing but “not Trump” and “more Obama giveaways,” Biden has now stepped forward and said that he will ask Americans for another hundred days of mask-wearing.

Most of us assumed, cynically, that the masks would go away after the election. Almost everyone except the hysterical has tired of wearing them. Even more, we realize that unless we restart normal life and our economy quickly, we are soon going to be eating these masks as mass poverty kicks in.

The prospect of more misery, a destroyed economy, a jubiliant and malicious China rising over us, and a return to the type of racial grievance politics that made the Obama era so repellent, has Americans thinking seriously about how to escape this dying civilization.

The complete lack of recognition of the utter disaster of the Obama presidency by the Leftists who get a paycheck either way appalls us, and their inability to recognize what a political, social, and economic crisis they will create makes us doubt their sincerity and competence.

As Georgia battles it out over certifying votes in the midst of a storm of videos of obvious vote fraud, it becomes clear that Trump is winning his grinding war. He will fight the bad vote counts at the state level, then take it to the courts, then reveal foreign participation, and finally take this to the legislatures.

The longer this takes, the more China celebrates and Americans suffer. An insecure election emboldens the bad and weakens the good, but it also prohibits us from moving forward with any plans that do not conclude within the next two weeks.

In the meantime, a Trump return would mean the resumption of his aggressive economic policy that is moving jobs to America, disconnecting us from the failing globalist system, and cutting the bloat and fat that chokes every level of our system, including its armies of subversive bureaucrats.

Even if Biden is proclaimed winner, most of the country will not believe it, with somewhere above half of Americans thinking this election was fraudulent or stolen. He (or Kamala, when he strokes out) will be a lame duck from his first day in office, lacking credibility or respect.

Even more, connections to organized crime, manipulative billionaires, and foreign powers means that no matter what Biden does, this will not go away. If crowned president, he will be removed. He will be taken down by civil suits and criminal charges either way.

Worse, perhaps, for the Left, is that this election has brought the term “stolen” into our national discourse. While we are thinking of a stolen election, we are also thinking of a stolen country, transformed into a socialist, feminist, and transgenderist diversity wasteland run by cynical billionaires; we are thinking of a stolen future, realizing that under this system we have no existence but as wage slaves to pay for the taxes that buy votes as the USA slips from superpower to Mexico status.

No One Believes The Biden Lie PT 2

by Brett Stevens on December 4, 2020

http://www.amerika.org/politics/no-one-believes-the-biden-lie/

Trump is working from the ground up. Instead of rushing to some authority to help him out, he has played by the rules, fighting this out in the local areas and demanding a fair election. He has revealed the problems in these places. Leftists have revealed that they refuse to accept any criticism and have zero concerns for whether the election was legitimate or not.

This brings in the conflict that Trump always wanted to bring up anyway: whether we are a Leftist nation, or as our founders designed it, the furthest Right-wing iteration of a Left-wing system, namely democracy. They never wanted mob rule, identity politics, or political correctness.

As the evidence piles up, the Left look insane and the Right look more like patient parents waiting for a tantrum to end than the Hitler wannabes that the media claimed they were. Our failing system slides further into oblivion and Rightism now shows us the only path out of this dysfunction.

Other than the self-brainwashing baristas, welfare magnets, and bureaucrats who have self-brainwashed into supporting Biden at the expense of all else, no one believes the media narrative. No one believes the Left. No one believes what China and Big Tech want us to believe.

Had the Left handled this like mature and responsible adults, saying that they would look into the election irregularities and be sure to fix things right up if anything was wrong, they would not be in this place. Instead they acted like triumphant thieves, fitting the narrative.

Trump has spent four years governing gently and from the periphery instead of taking the bold, authoritative actions that the far-Right wanted him to take. He did not want to appear to his people to be a tyrant, so he behaved accordingly, and deferred punishment of the bad and destruction of the corrupt.

Now he has his mandate. For a democracy, orderly transfer of power, including fair elections, anchors the legitimacy of the system and its function. With this in doubt, it looks like American democracy has failed and a vast change is upon us. The system will change; we will change.

Even if Biden were to win, demands for vote accountability and punishment of those responsible for this massive mess will not cease. If these are not addressed, the country will fail not by civil war but by widespread lack of participation. Why pay taxes when your government is imploding?

No one has faith in this system. We know now that the Left figured out several ways to game it, including demographic displacement and vote fraud, and we see that they have “transformed” America from a first-world and promising nation to a moribund kleptocracy.

If Trump had said that he was the only way out of a path to being Mexico 2.0, few would have believed him, but now, they have been shown. Even the silliest most out-of-touch person realizes that the media narrative is too uniform, too rehearsed, and too strident to be anything but controlling.

Almost everyone has contact with someone who has been passing them the videos, documents, and spreadsheets of this failed election. Word of mouth spreads this stuff faster and better than Big Media, even, because it is ideological contraband of the highest order and, most of all, interesting.

As usual, Trump has created a spectacle worthy of the Roman Coliseum where the gladiator fights swamp creatures and twisted fell beasts in order to reclaim the Republic from chaos. Who can avert their eyes from such high drama and terrifying conflict?

No one believes Joe Biden, and he is fading into obscurity, probably hiding behind a cloud of health problems and family issues like Hunter Biden and his laptop of moronic sins. He knows his window is closing. The lights are getting dim. For a few brief moments, he was president, but now he is nothing.

Kamala Harris seems to have read the writing on the wall and has stepped back in order to distance herself from whatever lugubrious disintegration is to follow. The most ardent voices on the Left have stopped talking about the election as a done deal, and are back to criticizing Trump.

In short, whether we realize it or not, history has moved on. Biden has no options; Trump has made his case, and now as it widens and reveals more of the horror, the Left and its captive bureaucracy find themselves looking like something America could do without and needs to lose.

No One Believes The Biden Lie PT 3

by Brett Stevens on December 4, 2020

http://www.amerika.org/politics/no-one-believes-the-biden-lie/

Trump has won. He always had the votes, and now he has the proof, and his grinding assault does more to damage the Left every day. If they were anything but a political machine, geared only toward theft through victory, they might cease their tone deaf bleating and listen to the people.

Instead, they grind on, making us wonder how long this sort of corruption has ruled America, and how to get out from under it. We realize that it is a parasite, and that it will drain us of life, much as it has already wrecked normal life since the 1980s.

In short, we have come to realize that we cannot coexist with a Biden/China win, and for that reason, that these election “irregularities” need to be looked at seriously, even if the media will not. This is what it looks like when people lose faith.

It feels like we turned a corner today. The lockstep media presented the image of Trump having no evidence, but instead we see a steady stream of videos, affidavits, trucks, xeroxed ballots, ejected poll observers, and false mail-in votes. The mainstream media has been unable to suppress this.

As a result, we are hearing a great sigh out there as public opinion shifts. Previously, the path of least resistance meant accepting Joe Biden and his Chinese masters; now, it means accepting that Trump has made his case, and we need to push those responsible for this fraud out of government entirely.

Sea Change PT 2

by Brett Stevens on December 3, 2020

http://www.amerika.org/politics/sea-change/

About a thousand years ago, we began rediscovering the technology of the ancients from the first few iterations of this cycle, and started both growing in power and decaying. Groups of humans tend toward pacifism and compromise, which further obscures the why behind what we do, and the mixed terror and freedom of approaching the unknown, having to derive elemental principles, and figuring out how to master it.

Within a few centuries, a new system appeared: government by compromise. This had been tried before and had a deservedly bad reputation, but by 1789, it was poised to take over Europe and the New World. This new system, democracy, made us all equal or uniformly entitled to city-style jobs, contracts, and earnings.

With the advent of the first world war, this system completed its conquest of aristocracy, or hereditary rule by our most competent with a social hierarchy of the same. With the advent of the second world war, the notion of personal freedom won out over civilizational freedom, and the world united on liberal democracy.

On the surface, it seemed like we were not in decay. We had more technology and wealth than ever before, and could explore the skies, seas, and space. After that, the digital world and that of the microscope expanded as well. It seemed that nothing could stop humanity.

Cynics like myself noted that this cannot have been the first time that this happened. Artifacts of technology, delicate as they are, would not survive the ravages of time that blunted the pyramids and eroded the faces of statues of the ancient gods. There is more to history than we recognize today.

If you want to see the decay, the literature of the 1920s through 1970s shows it to us most clearly: on the surface, we had chrome and gold, but underneath, dark existential doubt. We might even call it existential entropy, the anomie that arises from no choice being significant.

The first signs appeared in subtlety. Fewer of the very intelligent had children or even bothered to get married; people became self-destructive, and the “cool” (apathetic, selfish, individualistic) anti-hero replaced the heroes of old on our aspirational scale.

After 1945, the world system became standardized, as Francis Fukuyama noted, only undergoing its final stage in 1991 when the USSR exited history, leaving a hybrid of liberal democracy, socialist-style entitlements, civil rights, and an ideology of narcissistic individualism behind.

This system showed even more cracks. Culture died and was replaced with commerce, which was easy because “freedom” means that each person is accountable to nothing but his bank account, making him into a financial unit in a fungible sea of others. Equality means uniformity and replaceability, like the interchangeable parts in our machines or the laws that rule us instead of exceptional men (and Margaret Thatcher).

At this point, the die-off accelerated, finally getting really ugly in the 1960s when society decided that its ideology needed to outlive its people. Borders opened; social barriers fell; standards dropped like a stone. A new pop culture of prole ideals and entertainment swept aside classical culture.

After the Soviet Union died, it seemed like a golden age had dawned. You could do anything with your life, so people wanted a hybrid between making money and doing “meaningful” things in the eyes of others, in other words, social success. Technology made anything appear impressive with enough cash.

At this point we were living in a surface age. Movies no longer told stories because all that mattered was the booming THX soundtrack, the special effects, and the unique visual appearance and contrived setting and personality affections of their characters. Vapidity became the new profundity.

Some called this postmodernism, after the movement that said that there were multiple ways to view any event, none of which was an absolute, shared, and universal truth, value, or communication. This was replaced by postmodernism lite, the idea that individual perception was such a truth.

That made life largely pointless. Perception and appearance mattered above all else, and actually doing something significant or powerful was forgotten. Even technology devolved into repetitions of the same basic ideas, always improving but never leveling up.